Impaired Listeners' Recognition of Speech Presented Dichotically Through High- and Low-Pass Filters

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Abstract
50-word phonetically balanced word lists were presented to hearing-impaired subjects dichotically, with the signal going to one ear high-pass filtered above 780 Hz, and the same signal simultaneously presented to the other ear through a low-pass filter with the same cutoff frequency. The performance with this split-signal presentation was compared to both unfiltered diotic and high-pass diotic presentations. The split-signal scheme did not show a significant advantage over both the unfiltered and high-pass diotic presentations in any of the 22 subjects tested; in 1 subject it showed a significant disadvantage. Group differences were near zero for 16 subjects tested at the presumed maximum of their performance-intensity function and showed only a weak (insignificant) advantage for the split-signal scheme over the unfiltered presentation when most comfortable level and the best of three filter cutoff frequencies were chosen individually for 6 subjects. The conclusion was drawn that the split-signal presentation neither increases nor decreases word recognition scores at relatively high levels in quiet in a predominantly older population.

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